Why I'd like to be ... Molly Ringwald in Pretty in Pink

Together with John Hughes, Molly Ringwald created a character that is plain and beautiful, confident and insecure, wise and foolish – a credible teenager, in other words, but one who has learned some crucial life lessons

Pretty in Pink is not John Hughes's best teen film; that title clearly belongs to the deeply weird and brilliant Ferris Bueller's Day Off. But it does feature his best female character, and considering Hughes also created Jeanie and Grace in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Watts in Some Kind of Wonderful and Alison in The Breakfast Club, that's really saying something. In fact, I'm going to lay it out straight: Andie isn't just Hughes' best character (although I do also have a huge soft spot for John Candy in Planes, Trains and Automobiles), she's one of the best young female characters in cinema.

It's no surprise that Hughes wrote his best character for Ringwald. She was, famously, his great muse and this was their third film together, having already made Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club. Much is made among us Hughes fans about how the writer/director, despite being in his 30s when he made his teen films, was like a teenager himself in many ways, which is why he was still able to tap into teen emotions in a way no writer has managed since. Less discussed is how much his teen stars influenced him, and how much he wanted them to do so, particularly Ringwald. He'd talk to her for hours about her worries, her interests, what music she liked, what clothes she loved. In fact, Ringwald gave Hughes the title of this film when she introduced him to the song of the same name. Yes, there are plenty of autobiographical moments in Hughes' teen films, but he was a lot less interested in his own youth than he was in those of contemporary teenagers. Not many adults can say that.

So by the time Hughes sat down to write Pretty in Pink, he knew Ringwald pretty well, which is why he was able to create such a credible teenage girl character. Andie is plain and beautiful, confident and insecure, wise and foolish, happy and furious, mature and childish, lustful and fearful. She is, in short, a teenager. Ringwald and Howard Deutch – Pretty in Pink's director – have said since how much Andie was like Ringwald and Hughes, in a non-creepy way, clearly adored her. Early on in the film, we see Andie driving to school, and she gets out of the car, looking like she rolled in a garage sale and wearing the specciest of speccy glasses. But far from this making her unattractive in the movie's world, she immediately then lives my dream by being hit on by James Spader, who plays the school bully Steff with typical Spader-esque creepiness. But Andie is having none of it and rejects him and his cut-price American Gigolo ways. One of the sweetest things about this movie is the way Hughes emphasises that the reason Andie is then bullied by Steff is not because he thinks she's "a mutant", as he claims, or even because she's different: it's because she knocked him back. As lessons to teenage girls go, telling them misogyny often stems from male insecurity is a pretty good one.

Andie is – to use a dreaded word – quirky, but not in a forced Juno-esque way. In fact, it largely stems from the fact that she's poor. Her mother left and her father – played by the brilliant Harry Dean Stanton, fresh from Paris, Texas – has been unemployed and depressed ever since, and the household pretty much survives on Andie's pay cheque from the record store. This is why she has to make her own clothes, but far from this being a reason to pity her as her classmates think, Hughes suggests it's a reflection of her admirable creativity, and if it does then result in her making the ugliest prom dress of all time, well, then that's a risk worth taking to be an individual. But at the beginning of the movie, Andie hasn't quite accepted her differences yet. Unlike her best friend Duckie (Jon Cryer), and her record store colleague Iona (Annie Potts, aka Janine from Ghostbusters), there's a part of her that does wish she was different, that she was wealthy and cool and lived in a big house. Unlike her friends, she is overly defensive about those kids, because she secretly wishes she were more like them.

It took me years before I learned to stop apologising for myself. It wasn't until my early twenties before I learned that just because someone told me that someone (or something) was desirable, cool or interesting, that didn't necessarily make it so. Andie learns both of these crucial life lessons more quickly. When she starts dating the wealthy Blane (played by Andrew McCarthy at his most McCarthyesque) she finds the strength of character to stand up for herself, not because she thinks she and Blane are too different, but because she understands she's pretty great. My favourite moment in the movie is when Blane picks her up for their ill-fated first date and asks if she wants to go home to change.

If Andrew McCarthy picked me up for a date today and asked if I wanted to go home to change, I'd dash home and change into my fanciest outfit. Andie, however, refuses to change one iota of herself for this boy (there is no dreaded makeover in this movie), even though she is consumed with lust for him (when they kiss at the end of the evening, she practically eats him.) I spent my entire teen years (and most of my 20s) changing myself to what I thought guys wanted – my clothes, my personality, my everything. Pretending to like music I didn't like, pretending to like parties I hated. Andie, however, refuses even to change her hat for this guy (who is Andrew McCarthy ... ANDREW MCCARTHY). She makes them leave his lame friends' lame party and is ready to leave him entirely (ANDREW MCCARTHY) because she wisely realises that this won't work. But they stay together because he asks her to the prom, and that makes sense: it's easy to sneer at American school traditions, but, as Iona warns her, to do that means losing the mythologised memory you know you'll be expected to have in adulthood. But then Blane lames out on taking her, and this is where Andie really comes into her own.

Once Andie realises that she's been dumped, she doesn't slink away, hide under a rock, hate herself forever for being so stupid as to think someone as beautiful as Blane could ever like her and stay away from him so as not to make him feel awkward, as I definitely would have done as a teenager. No, she confronts him, furiously, and calls him "a fucking liar" (a rare instance of swearing in a Hughes film) and leaves him feeling absolutely terrible. And then she goes to the prom on her own "so they know they didn't break me", as she tells her dad. Andie is awesome.

Here, though, the movie comes unstuck. In the original version of the film, Andie and Duckie get together at the prom, which is how it should be, because Duckie is great and Blane is an idiot. But because Hughes and Deutch made the grave mistake of casting ANDREW MCCARTHY as Blane, there was no way Andie could end up with anyone but him, as teen test audiences made extremely clear to the film-makers. So, reluctantly, they reshot the ending with Andie getting together with Blane after Blane says it was Andie's fault he lamed out on her, which makes absolutely no sense, and Duckie then runs off with Kirsty Swanson, who went on to play Buffy the Vampie Slayer in the film version, which makes even less sense.

But no matter, Andie is still mighty. And to be fair, maybe it's for the best. As her father tells Duckie earlier in the film, just because Duckie likes Andie doesn't mean Andie will like him, and, through Andie's family, Hughes shows the unhappiness caused when a woman marries a man she doesn't actually love. Even though it's not what he intended, this film demonstrates that getting together with the good guy is not always the happy ending – sometimes a woman wants something else. Being a tenacious good guy doesn't always work, and that's just life.

Another reason I love Andie is because of how she looks. It is heartbreaking to see how natural teen actresses could look in films made only 30 years ago, and still be celebrated: not skinny, not blowdried, not flaunting flesh. Because they were supposed to be actresses, not models. Teen actresses no longer have that luxury. Ringwald, with her snub nose and slightly slack jaw, was obviously very pretty as a teenager, but she looks like a teenager you might have been friends with at school. She's unstyled, her hair's messy, she wears bad glasses and she's not skinny. It is impossible to imagine her being cast as the ultimate teen icon in a film today, and I really can't think of a stronger indictment against today's insane beauty standards than that.

As a kid, I would pretend that when I finally became a teenager, I'd be like Sloane in Ferris Bueller, all confident and beautiful and with a boyfriend who picked her up from school in a car. But in my heart of hearts, I knew that, really, I'd be Andie in Pretty in Pink, who's gawky and defensive and drives her own damn self to school. And as Andie finds out, that's just fine.